#59: Kick-Ass (2010)

My name is Ed, and my superpower is that I can watch a Nicolas Cage movie, use it to pick six numbers, and enter the UK National Lottery. You may say that anyone can do this, and so it is not a superpower. But if that’s true, why am I the only person who does do it?

I’d say that there’s nothing wrong with the basic premise of Kick-Ass: what if a guy without superpowers or special abilities of any kind decided to put on a costume a fight crime? I’d say that if there hadn’t been another film released in 2010 — ‘Super’ — with exactly the same premise, that’s also a pile of crap.

The problem is that the premise really only suggests one joke: someone dressed in a superhero costume is on the receiving or giving end of some ‘realistic’ violence. After that you’ve got to move on and do something else, and what Kick-Ass chooses to do is to tell a fairly straightforward superhero origin story.

And it has a few nice ideas about how to do that: our hero Dave/Kick-Ass unintentionally gains a minor ‘superpower’ in that the injuries sustained during his first attempt at heroism leave him full of metal plates and unable to feel pain; Kick-Ass’s real power being the cult following he gains on MySpace (although, MySpace: in 2010?).

Yer man Nicolas Cage turns up as Big Daddy, an ex-cop turned vigilante who wears an ersatz Batman costume and whose sidekick Hit Girl is his 11-year-old daughter. Cage claims to have been referencing Adam West’s campy performance in the ’60s TV Batman — maybe here and there, but at heart the character is a sort of keen sub-urban sport dad who just happens to be coaching their kid in the sport of ‘revenge killing’. His non-eyelid batting chipperness almost steals the movie, but tiny Chloë Grace Moretz is an impressive foil and more than holds her own against him.

But. But. Kick-Ass is extraordinarily pleased with itself, constantly winking at the audience, so busy passing notes saying ‘look how subversive!’ that it fails to notice that it’s actually telling a fairly straightforward story. Listen, did you hear the 11-year-old say the C word? Did you see how many killings just happened? Are you offended? Am I offending you now?

Worse still is the streak of casual homophobia, particularly evident in a sub-plot in which Dave’s attempts to cover up his superheroic activities result in everyone assuming he’s gay, which is the subject of much ‘hilarity’, because can you even imagine? It’s okay though, because he uses the fact that everyone thinks he’s gay to touch a pretty lady without her knowing that it’s turning him on. Big LOLs!

Putting this stuff in your film isn’t subversive, it’s just being an arsehole. Any bright moments in Kick-Ass are drowned out by the feeling that the main intended audience is anyone who’ll whoop at yet more unpleasantly ‘real’ violence and/or someone being called a fag.

Still, there’s a scene where Nicolas Cage kills Dexter Fletcher in a car crushing machine, which has got to be useful trivia for someone one day.

THE NUMBERS

3 — At one point we see a cinema advertising a screening of The Spirit 3. This is presumably a (mean-spirited, LOL?) joke about The Spirit, a Frank Miller-helmed superhero movie that bombed so bad basically everyone has forgotten it even existed.

7 — A handgun bullet travels at more than 7 hundred miles per hour. Big Daddy demonstrates this by shooting Hit Girl in the chest. It’s okay, it’s just a training exercise, and she’s wearing a bullet proof vest! Also it’s just a film, so it’s only pretend.

11 — Hit Girl is 11-years-old. Or at least the actress who played her was at the time the film was made. It says here.

14 — Big Daddy and Hit Girl live in an apartment numbered 14.

16 — Dave’s MySpace has 38 friends. Kick-Ass’s MySpace: 16,000 and counting. Was anyone even still using MySpace in 2010? I did survey on Twitter and no-one was, so there. Wait, was this deeply misguided product placement?

30 — Apparently you can microwave someone to death in 30 seconds. If you have a microwave big enough to put a human in. The bloke they microwave to death looks a bit like Rory from Doctor Who. But it isn’t him. I checked. It’s just some bloke.

THE RESULT

0 numbers. It’s official: don’t become a vigilante.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which is literally based on that bit of Fantasia. Because???